The mayor could then look nursing home resident Loretta Stone in the eye and tell her about his plan to kill the bookmobile.

That news stunned Stone so much that she raised her hand in desperation during a church service Sunday. "Say a prayer for the bookmobile," she cried. "It's my whole life."

The 56-year-old woman has cerebral palsy. She uses a wheelchair. She vows to fight for the bookmobile, which gives her and so many others a link to the outside world. "I know the bookmobile costs money," Stone told me. "But just look at the happiness it gives people ... this will break my heart."

A wonderful program instituted by Anywhere Books (a US-based nonprofit dedicated to deploying mobile print on demand solutions for developing countries) and supported by the World Bank has outfitted a special bookmobile to travel around the countryside of Uganda, where the children can board, choose a title (out of a databank of 20,000), and get to print and bind their very own copy of a book to keep. Ordinarily, there is one textbook for every six kids in Uganda, and most of the lessons consists of drill and repeat.

The bookmobile traveled three days per week from Kampala to the Buikwe region in southern Uganda and regularly visited several of the 25 schools in the area. Librarians worked with the kids to print their own books. Popular titles included Sleeping Beauty, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Rabbit and stories from the Bible.

Wisconsin's Brown County has lots of little schools spread around a vast area, and not alot of public libraries that are easily accessible to students and seniors. But it does have a beat-up Bookmobile, and â€œBookmobile Bobâ€? Ripley. Because the Bookmobileâ€™s on-board generator is on the fritz, Ripley plugs his vehicle into nearby power outlets when he makes stops in rural areas or at metropolitan nursing homes.

Last year, county officials proposed junking the Bookmobile as part of budget cuts. Colleen Magley of Wayside said area residents raised $301 from a bratwurst fry for operating costs for the Bookmobile.

Anonymous Patron writes "Slashdot pointed the way to An AP Article on some nifty brightly painted pedal-carts accompanied by a computer instructor who gives classes to young and old, students and teachers alike. The bicycle cart is the center of a project called "Infothela," or info-cart. It aims to use technology to improve education, health care and access to agricultural information in India's villages, where most of the country's 1.06 billion people live.

There's an older article at The Times Of India and more on the project Here, which includes a diagram of the nifty looking bikes."

Cecil County Maryland is looking forward to receiving its brand new $160,000 state of the art bookmobile next spring, and the kids and their families can't wait to climb aboard and borrow books.

But according to this article in the Cecil Whig , it sounds like with only 52,000 miles, the old bookmobile may still have a bit of life in it. Librarian/chauffeur Maxine Gibbs says despite its resemblance to a bread truck, its slightly leaky roof and no radio reception, the van is always greeted enthusiastically, with kids begging for her to blow the horn so they can climb up and check out the Clifford books, comics and anime.

Interesting story on bookmobiles which provide print-on-demand titles for people who might not have ready access to a regular library.

How it works is that a book or manuscript is first scanned by a high-end Minolta BS 7000 scanner, (one hundred of them were recently donated by the Carnegie Mellon University, followed by a "cropper" treatment whereby all unwanted stains or needless images on the original text are deleted. Before being put on the web the manuscript passes through indigenously developed software called the Optical Corrector Recognizer, available currently in seven Indian languages.

The service is very popular and often 200 people will show up at any given stop. The organizers hope to have service available to all of India by 2008. More from Rediff.

In an effort to reach out to middle and high school kids in Ames, tomorrow the library bookmobile will popover to the town's skate park and try to enhance the kids to skid to a stop and read.

Librarian Kay Marner has worked with younger staff members to choose skater-friendly music such as Nirvana, Metallica, Beastie Boys and Smashing Pumpkins. They've gathered DVDs of famed skater Tony Hawk and books on extreme sports. Marner said, "We're shooting for what we think the kids would like."

Anonymous Patron sends "this bookmobile story from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review about how bookmobiles serve remote areas and homebound patrons in Pennsylvania.

Bob Cox sends another one from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer about the restoration of Washington states first bookmobile. The chassis of the 1924 Model AA Ford, named Pegasus, was lovingly restored and put back into service. Everett library's outreach coordinator Theresa Gemmer commented that outreach staff are '...kind of like the Marines of librarians -- whatever it takes, we get the books to the people,' Some nice pictures of the project here. "

Anonymous Patron writes "I just love Bookmobile Stories. This one is from Millville, Utah, and covers Donald Penrod, who, Five years after retiring as Box Elder County's bookmobile librarian is busier than ever. Now he is making the rounds through hundreds of Utah neighborhoods on mobile-library routes in Box Elder, Cache, Duchesne, Rich, Summit, Tooele and Utah counties. He is a substitute bookmobile driver. And the routes are less demanding than when he was the librarian."

Here's a cute story out of Washington state about a 1924 Ford Model AA bookmobile named Pegasus. "Peggy," as librarians refer to it, belongs to the Everett Public Library and may have been the first bookmobile west of the Mississippi. It has quite an interesting history. Read it. (includes photo)